47 replies to this topic

[Roadbeer]

I'm going to keep the premise short in order to open the topic for debate of merit rather than specifics in my OP.

It seems to me that ballistics and missiles are arbitrarily lumped into ghost heat in a way that often defies logic.

I suggest, removing the GH penalties on them and reintroduce rearm costs.

Discuss.

[FupDup]

Spacebucks don't balance in-game performance, because spacebucks penalties get paid after the match is already over and done with. Removal from GH is fine, but find another way to actually balance them.

On that note, most ballistics and missiles aren't even imbalanced right now. A good number of them are actually sub-par or sometimes worse.

[Bilbo]

I like rearm costs but it doesn't address the issue GH penalties are there to address(High damage Alphas).

[1453 R]

Put another way: "Remove ballistics from the realm of use of everyone who is not sitting on a million billion trillion spare Spacebux because nobody can afford 200k rearm costs except people who don't care about money anymore."

No. Fix Ghost Heat until it works something resembling properly, or remove it altogether and replace it with a cleaner and more effective system (which is my vote), but I'd rather leave it as-is and deal with it the same as I have been than deal with rearm costs. There were very, very good reasons for the removal of R&R from the game, and they haven't gotten any less relevant.

[Roadbeer]

1453 R, on 03 October 2014 - 11:26 AM, said:

Put another way: "Remove ballistics from the realm of use of everyone who is not sitting on a million billion trillion spare Spacebux because nobody can afford 200k rearm costs except people who don't care about money anymore."

Or, you know, encourage smarter play in the "Thinking mans shooter" that goes beyond holding down a button and spamming (insert weapon system here). Hitting the wallet is a good way to do that. There is no discouragement to wasting resources in a dystopian and bankrupt future.

[1453 R]

Roadbeer, on 03 October 2014 - 11:31 AM, said:

Or, you know, encourage smarter play in the "Thinking mans shooter" that goes beyond holding down a button and spamming (insert weapon system here). Hitting the wallet is a good way to do that. There is no discouragement to wasting resources in a dystopian and bankrupt future.

Fantastic. How many of the top-end players who're already abusing the systems to the nines would care about a hit to the wallet? Most of them are swimming in C-bills and already think nothing whatsoever of tossing off 80k a round for consumables.

Now, ask the rookie players with a half-dozen 'Mechs, scrimping and saving for every weapon, every ammo bin, with their next 'Mech a distant dream and the notion of modules a ludicrous joke, players who already can't afford consumables as is, what they would think of dumping another 80k a match just to restock their ammo bins and keep their 'Mechs in fighting shape.

I'm pretty sure I know what they'd say to you, man.

Edited by 1453 R, 03 October 2014 - 11:40 AM.

[Blackscreen]

So, Dakkalurmpocalypse?

Edited by Blackscreen, 03 October 2014 - 11:41 AM.

[Thragen]

IMO, the first step to fixing the heat scale is to divorce a mech's heat capacity from the number of heat sinks it carries. Once the heat capacity is no longer ***tightly coupled*** to the number of heat sinks, you can easily set a static heat capacity value and then you can easily make adjustments.

I have bolded the ***tightly coupled*** text because any time you can say that about any sort of software, games or otherwise, you have made a big mistake in the design of your software.

[Roadbeer]

1453 R, on 03 October 2014 - 11:40 AM, said:

Fantastic. How many of the top-end players who're already abusing the systems to the nines would care about a hit to the wallet? Most of them are swimming in C-bills and already think nothing whatsoever of tossing off 80k a round for consumables.

Now, ask the rookie players with a half-dozen 'Mechs, scrimping and saving for every weapon, every ammo bin, with their next 'Mech a distant dream and the notion of modules a ludicrous joke, players who already can't afford consumables as is, what they would think of dumping another 80k a match just to restock their ammo bins and keep their 'Mechs in fighting shape.

I'm pretty sure I know what they'd say to you, man.

Well, then I would relate to them the lesson I learned once I hit Tier 7 in WoT and realized it was costing me money, even on a win, after R&R.

Play smarter.

Suddenly not only did I realize I was living longer, but I got better at the game, especially once I stopped shooting terrain and WASDerping across open ground, Oddly enough, the game became more fun as well once I started thinking about my shots.

[Wintersdark]

Remove Ghost Heat; cap the maximum number of PPC's that can be fired at one time to 2 or 3 - the code for that is already in game and already works, it's just not enabled. It was added as a potential solution to Gauss/PPC issues.

No more 6PPC Stalker/Direstar/whatever.

[3rdworld]

Agree.

There is a reason only the 20s have any penalty worth noting. The rest seem like a waste given how relatively few mechs can carry the amount needed to trigger it. Not to mention most are so little it is irrelevant.

Edit: R&R should not ever come back out of the closet. GH on ammo dependent weapons should join it though.

Edited by 3rdworld, 03 October 2014 - 12:56 PM.

[Scratx]

How about... no?

Ghost Heat is not a perfect solution, but it beats the status quo that would exist if it weren't there. Likewise I do not think merely adjusting the ceiling on amount of heat before shutdown will help. It will cripple energy weaponry badly and encourage dakka and missiles. Which may be fun, yes, but do they really need the extra encouragement? They're hardly UP atm. AC/2 aside, all ACs are pretty good at what they do. Even Clan UACs, yes, despite the spreading damage, they're still ultra autocannons, so they're going to deliver more damage.

What we probably need is a mechanism that limits actually firing, not simply penalizing firing too much. (that nukes newbies that alpha the Nova Prime, what an excellent way of introducing them to MWO )

Call it Power Budget, for example, and give every weapon its own power draw when being fired. Autocannons can justify high power draws due to the energy the recoil absorption mechanisms need, gauss needs no explanation, lasers and PPCs likewise, missiles... recoil as well, I guess. This would work as an additional soft balancing mechanism on top of heat to limit alphas. Could do away with ghost heat. And it's a pretty transparent mechanism. Power Budget could even vary by mech if we wanted to, via quirks, so some might be better suited for high power drain weapons while others are not.

Let's not screw the game up, guys. Ghost Heat is detestable mainly only because it doesn't fix all the problems (not a complete solution) and it's opaque as F... . We want something better than this, but until we do we're better off with GH than not.

[Fut]

1453 R, on 03 October 2014 - 11:26 AM, said:

Put another way: "Remove ballistics from the realm of use of everyone who is not sitting on a million billion trillion spare Spacebux because nobody can afford 200k rearm costs except people who don't care about money anymore."

I've seriously never seen somebody exaggerate to the extent that you do.
Seriously, it doesn't help your argument... not in the slightest.

[XxXAbsolutZeroXxX]

Roadbeer, on 03 October 2014 - 11:22 AM, said:

It seems to me that ballistics and missiles are arbitrarily lumped into ghost heat in a way that often defies logic.

I suggest, removing the GH penalties on them

Is it logical for maddogs to spam 6 x srm-6 without heat penalties?

You have to explain why you think boating dual AC-20 or triple LRM-20 without heat penalties would be a good thing.

Be more specific, plz.

.

Edited by I Zeratul I, 03 October 2014 - 12:03 PM.

[terrycloth]

Saving ammo at the risk of losing your mech which costs multiple orders of magnitude more than all your ammo put together is not playing smarter, it's introducing another artificial constraint that might only make sense because we have to have a system that makes losing your ridiculously expensive mech 75% of the time profitable (assuming you're going up against equally skilled people aka "the matchmaker is working").

You cannot have any sort of realistic economy in a pvp deathmatch arena game. It only works in single player.

[Eddrick]

It's a start.

It's a good first step to getting rid of Ghost Heat, all together.

[Xarian]

• C-Bill costs have nothing to do with in-game performance. Adding rearm costs won't replace ghost heat, because ghost heat is an in-game mechanic and rearm costs are an out-of-game mechanic. It would only be relevant if the rearm costs somehow translated to an in-game effect; for example, if rearming were somehow limited then you might not be able to drop with full (or any) ammunition - for example, during CW, if you are required to bring specific amounts of ammunition with you in a long campaign. Even if you were Richer Than Blake, you couldn't fit 2.5 million AC/20 rounds on your dropship.
  
• GH is not the best solution to heat issues, but it slows down ridiculous alphas, which is why it was implemented in the first place. GH penalties on 2+x AC20, 6x LRM20 or 6x SRM6 is a good thing. Balancewise, it needs to stay.
  
• I'm in favor of tweaking the GH system to eliminate or reduce some penalties. AC/2, for example, shouldn't be on the GH list at all - the weapon is already extremely inefficient in terms of heat, tonnage, and ammunition. It shouldn't also be penalized if a JM6-DD decides that it wants to use a bunch of them. Likewise, the penalty for massing AC/5 is so small that it should either be removed completely or jacked up significantly.

[XxXAbsolutZeroXxX]

Eddrick, on 03 October 2014 - 12:05 PM, said:

It's a start.

It's a good first step to getting rid of Ghost Heat, all together.

Ghost heat is a good system.

Why would anyone want to get rid of it?

[1453 R]

You're not getting it, Roadbeer.

You think it's as easy as "Just hit what you shoot at, stupid!", but here's the thing. They already know that. Nobody sets out deliberately intending to miss half their shots. Running out of ammo, and thus being down the use of your ammo-fed weapons for the rest of the fight, is supposed to be the penalty for being profligate with your expenditures, not "Running out of ammo and being unable to afford more, unlike the guys sitting on two hundred million C-bills who can do whatever the hell they want.."

The point is that R&R, or even just rearm as you propose, is a flat penalty that is utterly meaningless to the experienced, established players who already know how to break the system wide open anyways. It's a bar to entry more than a realistic penalty, and this game's entry bar is already unacceptably high.

[Roadbeer]

I Zeratul I, on 03 October 2014 - 12:02 PM, said:

Is it logical for maddogs to spam 6 x srm-6 without heat penalties?

You have to explain why you think boating dual AC-20 or triple LRM-20 without heat penalties would be a good thing.

Be more specific, plz.

.

Actually, I avoided being specific for a reason. That way the merit of the idea is discussed, without resorting to debating the scenarios I might include in the topic
It's quite a simple topic, should rearm replace GH for the weapon systems that use ammo? and YOU explain your reason for/against it.